A woman who had made some serious mistakes confided to a friend, “My life feels like an unfinished book. It had a good beginning. But now I wonder how it will all turn out in the end.”
Her friend offered this insight: “A life story isn’t told in one chapter. And a book isn’t finished until the last page. If we can learn from the mistakes of the past and do a little better, then we can write the next chapter better than the last.”
Life is a work in progress. There may be paragraphs or whole chapters that we’d like to revise. But we cannot edit the past. Today is the day we must write our story. Thankfully, we don’t have to write it alone.
There is One who knows our life story from the end to the beginning. He knows how it will turn out. He knows where we’ve already been. And He knows where we still need to go. He is our Heavenly Father, the great Author of life. If we will let Him, He will guide us to the happy ending which all of us hope for.
Benjamin Franklin offered this insight when he wrote his own epitaph:
“[Here lies] the body of Benjamin Franklin, . . . (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and guilding) . . . ; but the work shall not be lost, for it will . . . appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”1
Every day we begin with a clean, blank page. No matter what’s in the previous chapters, the next chapter is always ours to write. As we submit our will to the true Author, we’ll find the finished product to be even better than we imagined.
Program #4023
¹ In Justin Kaplan, ed., Barlett’s Familiar Quotations, 17th ed. (2002), 319.